Science is imploding

(AP Photo)

Anybody who has been following the actual scientific research and debates about climate already knows that the enterprise is hopelessly compromised by politics.

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Yet in the case of climate research, we shouldn’t be surprised. Literally trillions of dollars are at stake, as well as the ability of the Establishment to take control over every aspect of our lives. It would be a wonder if money and politics DIDN’T come to corrupt the entire field.

Unfortunately, the politicization of that field opened the door to politicizing every aspect of science, and that effort is bearing fruit. There are few areas of study where politics has not become the dominant variable in determining what is funded, what is studied, what can be said, who can say it, and what is published.

As the current generation of scientists ages out, few people will be left to push back in defense of actual science. We saw this process take place in the Soviet Union with Lysenkoism, and it got so bad that the only fields that weren’t completely ruined were physics and mathematics. The Russians still excel in those fields, but in nothing else due to the Soviet hangover.

That process is well on its way to destroying science in the West, although technical fields are still thriving. But anything that can touch on politics is fundamentally compromised.

A great example is the decline of The Lancet, once the most important medical journal on the planet. Today it is a shell of its former self, with an editor who literally writes editorials quoting communists about social justice.

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I am not joking about either his commitment to cultural Marxism–literal Marxism–or his explicit dedication to using his power at The Lancet to reshape society through his appropriated authority over medical research. He says as much, openly. He is proud of it.

Horton’s latest editorial may be his most partisan statement yet — though also his most cringeworthy. It begins: “Occasionally, someone says something so appalling, so shocking, and so disheartening that you just stop in disbelief.” To what was Horton referring? A deeply flawed claim made by a putative expert? An announcement of dramatic funding cuts to basic research?

No, he was referring to something Suella Braveman said about migrants crossing the English Channel, namely that they “possess values which are at odds with our country” and are associated with “heightened levels of criminality”.

Now, it’s entirely appropriate to ask the Home Secretary for the evidence behind these claims, as others have done. What’s less appropriate is scrutinising them in the pages of a medical journal. You don’t find denunciations of Labour’s housing policy in the Journal of Zoology. So why is The Lancet attacking the Government’s stance on immigration?

The editorial goes on to discuss Antonio Gramsci — the Marxist philosopher and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party. “His great insight,” Horton notes, “was to recognise the way in which the dominant group uses culture to exert its controlling influence”. So which is the “dominant group” that threatens to take “controlling influence” today? According to Horton, it’s “populists”.

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You expect to find references to Gramsci in sociology or political philosophy discussions, not medical journals. Because, of course, Gramsci has nothing useful to say about rates of heart disease, treatments for cancer, or the whether eating red meat really does correlate with disease. As far as I know Gramsci’s discussion of the benefits and risks of PCSK9 inhibitors for heart disease was unilluminating, a fact that is unsurprising since nobody had heard of PCSK9 while he was alive.

He was a Marxist philosopher, not a scientist. And he is now the subject of an editorial in The Lancet.

This is the era of culture wars—politicised conflicts over values, identities, and beliefs. Are British institutions systemically racist? Should the monarchy pay reparations for its historical links to slavery? Are activists terrorising the young with climate doom? Has Brexit been a success? What is the definition of a woman? These debates are not confined to the UK. In the US, social conflicts over abortion—from the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs decision overruling Roe v Wade to recent legal disputes over access to mifepristone—have once again radicalised Presidential politics. Meanwhile, American universities have become a new battleground for free speech, triggering academics to mount a defence against the “asymmetric warfare” of cancel culture.

The Editor in Chief of The Lancet is calling for war to promote communism.

Not a shooting war, of course. But a war of the Establishment against the proles, ironically enough. He wants a war of the powerful against people with whom he disagrees, and he controls one of the two most powerful medical journals in the world. And, unless you failed to notice, we just went through a “medical emergency” that was used to fundamentally reshape society.

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It’s not just Horton. There is, literally, a new war against Randomized Controlled Trials in medicine.

No, I am not kidding. The failure of RCTs to confirm that masks work as a societal intervention against airborne viruses has spurred an attack, not on the idiotic policies, but on RCTs themselves. Reality must bend to the desires of the “scientists” who are in a position to demand compliance from the proles.

We keep being told that we must “follow the science,” but the people who control what is considered “science” are political hacks determined to control our lives. They conduct government-funded “research” that produces what the Establishment wants “found,” and in the odd case where that fails to happen, they attack the actual science itself. They even attack the scientific method if necessary.

In case you didn’t know, without RCTs we would know precisely nothing about what drugs work and which don’t, or whether certain interventions are helpful or not. Medicine is far too complicated to learn anything useful without testing outcomes in such trials. RCTs allow us to be something much better than witch doctors who create stories based on specious correlations.

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Take an example: I get the flu. I take sugar pills. I recover from the flu. Did the sugar pills help me recover? Probably not. But then I give everybody who gets the flu sugar pills and 99% recover. They must work!

Until you do the RCT and find that 99% recover regardless of this treatment you can easily be led astray.

Yet since RCTs prove that universal masking as a non-pharmaceutical intervention doesn’t work, RCTs must be attacked in today’s world.

The conclusion is what matters, not its truth. They DO NOT WANT THE TRUTH unless it confirms their desired outcome.

This is modern science, at least where it can touch on anything having to do with politics.

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David Strom 6:40 PM | April 18, 2024
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